And you shouldn't have to if Bioware is so dead set on making PVP and PVE completely separate gear sets, but they seem to have reached a level of competence that is just enough to annoy the largest number of people possible. I appreciate the conversation, though, it's nice to have a civil argument on the internet for once. Take care.

Except there you have the agency problem. "Painless" to you is not the same as "painless" to me and the other PVErs who posted in here about being carried/not caring. Painless for the PVPer: Everyone is geared properly/bolstered, everyone knows how to play and does their thing. Painless for the PVEr: Having to do as little work as possible to get the relic which usually means not bothering to switch gear or really do much else other than "Queue solo", "Turn in daily/weekly". The angrier you guys get at PVErs for doing this and the angrier PVErs get for having to do this, the more likely it is Bioware will fix it, so please get frustrated and loud and get Bioware to listen and stop making PVP relics better than everything else. Our interests are in full alignment in that regard. They aren't in any other aspect and they aren't going to be. You can't make PVErs like PVP, you can't make PVPers like PVE. You can make Bioware realize that and stop forcing the PVErs to PVP. If they're willing to make PVE relics not work in PVP, there's no reason at all why they can't do the same going the other way. To address the point earlier about me being "hypocritical" where did I say in any of my posts that I wouldn't take a PVP geared person on an op? Furthermore, Oricon takes, what, an hour to complete for a full set of 66s that will be more than good enough for any SM (the best run of DF I ever had was with the majority of people in 66s because they were good players who communicated well), if you're a casual raider (which, presumably, you are if you favor PVP and there's nothing wrong with that) that is all you need. PVP gear takes longer than an hour to get. Much, much longer. Unless you have enough planetary comms to 58-and-bolster (which I did not know was so effective until it was pointed out here), but that begs the question again as to why the hell they can't just bolster raiding gear the same way and adjust your stats to make it similar to Conqueror/Obroan? And in the interest of equality, why not bolster PVP gear for SM ops so it's equivalent to 66 gear? The new flashpoint coming out has some sort of Bolster system in place so characters of different levels can be grouped together, clearly Bioware has the ability to do it. Since 66 gear takes so little time to get you wouldn't have to worry about fresh 55s getting into Warzones to get "better" gear because it'd be faster just to do the Oricon missions and the PVPers can participate in ops without having to get a second gear set and then if you wanted to do more than SM you'd have to get tokens/comms like anyone else (just like if someone wants to do ranked they pretty much have to put in the effort to get "real" gear). There's a bazillion ways to make everyone happy here, all of which are less painful to both parties than the current system, which seems to piss everyone off (and again, rightfully so, I feel bad for the PVPers who have to deal with us PVErs but we hate it as much as you do). Yell at Bioware, not at us.

Because we actually WANT to do ops. We don't want to do PVP.

Well unless Chris Roberts is playing a very elaborate con I don't think that's going to happen. The original crowdfunding for SC was so they could take it to one of the established publishers and show that they had enough interest to make a space game worthwhile. The crowd funding blew up and they decided to skip the publisher and do it themselves. If I were scamming someone, I wouldn't start by trying to attract the attention of large companies with large legal departments. At this point he could run off with the cash but I somehow doubt someone who has spent 20+ years developing games (several of them critically acclaimed) is planning to lie about developing a new game for the sake of stealing money. If SC runs into issues with a release date, I fully believe it will not be because the team decided to scam everyone. It'll be because the team has no one telling setting deadlines and they just keep going crazy with new features and never actually finish the project. That was what happened with the original S.T.A.L.K.E.R game before THQ stepped in and, for Star Citizen at least, that is a far more likely issue than them just taking the money and running. Granted, the end result is still the same (no game, backers out of money) but that's a far less cynical fate. Also at that point a major publisher might pick it up, so there's probably a good chance Star Citizen will eventually be released. The question at that point is, will it fulfill all of its lofty promises?

I appreciate that you are trying to help but I don't care about being viable and neither do plenty of other PVErs. Which is why this problem exists.

That's true, but again I (and many of the other PVErs in this boat) don't care about being viable, we just want the relics. I'm not going to spend a single credit augmenting another set of gear to be viable in a game mode I hate and want no part of, and from the other posts in the thread it seems there are many who feel the same way. I think Bioware is hoping that PVErs will start to care about PVP when they do it for these relics to help the PVP population, but all it seems to be doing is making both sides pissed at one another for reasons that are entirely Bioware's fault. No, it's not fair to you and the people PVPing who do care about it, I fully understand that. The fix isn't going to be trying to make PVErs care about PVP, because that's not going to happen. The fix is to make Bioware stop stupidly making PVP relics so much better than comparable (as in, the stuff anyone can get pugging SMs since that's the closest analog to single queuing for PVP) PVE relics.

If that's the case, why don't they just apply a "reverse" bolster to PVE raiding gear that adjusts the stats to Conqueror baseline or similar? That way PVErs can "plug and play" without needing to worry about a set of gear at all. The majority of those players are there for the relic and nothing else, any sort of gear change they aren't going to do. Any amount of inconvenience for them is going to get passed along to the people in the warzone actually trying to play. That would also fix the issue of people who just want to casually play PVP every once in a while being stuck having to have two sets of gear. For the third time though, Bioware could effortlessly solve this problem by making the PVP relics not work in PVE instances.

Dailies and selling crafting mats (level 9 artifice stuff usually fetches pretty good prices I've found, just send my comps to gather when I'm not doing anything with them). Unless you're in the first wave of people to RE a mod/armoring/whatever, you're not likely going to make money from selling those because the mats are so expensive and once multiple crafters get the recipe they usually will start crafting for free if the buyer supplies the mats. I RE'd a few of the tanking 72 mods and made decent money for a little bit (could get 2 million/mod, mats cost was about 1 million to 1.3 million depending) but after a few weeks, when multiple crafters had the recipes, the price they could sell for was barely over the mats cost to the point of not being worth it. There's no point in crafting and selling for a 100,000 credit profit if it takes a week for the mod to sell, dailies will make that money in a day and then some. Plus, it's been a while since there's been a new gear tier so the market for people looking for 72 mods is pretty depressed now that 78s are so common from all the ultimate comms (and you can't RE those to craft yet). REing mods from the operations tokens has a little bit more longevity because you can't just buy those with comms but obviously that takes more effort to get than the comm gear. Crafting augments and augment slots is probably what I would focus on if you really want to craft because there's always a lot of demand for those since you can't legacy them like you can with gear. Every character that gets to 55 will need a lot of them. I've also had some good luck with purple lower level mods/hilts/enhancements. Usually the mats for those are pretty cheap and they sell for good money to people who don't want to swap their gear as much as they level. I've made a decent amount of money selling purple might hilt 13s, especially near double xp weekends, but dailies are still a more reliable money maker.

Roll a tank, or complain loudly to Bioware to make tank gearing in the end game less painful so people are more willing to do it. Or make Flashpoints actually drop something useful after you're in 72+ gear, I haven't done a flashpoint on my tank in months because he's in 78s and there's literally no reward for it. 12 Ultimate comms for 3? I'm out of stuff to buy with Ultimate comms, why bother? That and tanks and healers wouldn't be able to get a queue because going 4 DPS would get you through the FPs much faster than a "proper" group.

My roommate just started playing DCUO and the style system indeed caught my eye. But really, TOR already has that with the ability to swap mods into other pieces. It does not have the color system that DCUO has, but Bioware is unlikely to change that because then they couldn't sell color changes for real money in the Cartel Shop (which is blood-boilingly infuriating). People have been asking for different classes to use different weapons for a while and I doubt you'll see it happen. Every ability was animated for a certain weapon and pretty much for ONLY that certain weapon (save a few, like Ravage on the Sith Warrior has single and double saber animations), they'd have to reanimate everything which they definitely will not do.

Playing devil's advocate here: when you're solo queuing to grind your relic and you're up against a premade in min/maxed Obroan gear on the other side, it really doesn't matter how much effort you put in, you're going to get rocked by them in you bolster PVE gear. Which is why I don't like PVP to begin with. I'm not very good at it, I will freely admit that, but it really doesn't matter because even if I was an above-average player, some dude in Obroan would smoke me regardless simply because of the gear difference. Someone mentioned earlier that on Ops and FPs they can choose the level of content they want to do whereas you can't do that in PVP. I'd be up for a "No PVP Gear" queue where you could show up in your PVE stuff and not have to worry about Expertise, except the population of people interested in doing that I'm sure is far too low (I still wouldn't play it, but it would make the relic grinding less annoying to the people who actually like PVP) to make it feasible. Or Bioware could stop being *********** idiots and make PVP relics not work in PVE missions, or drop them back statwise to the equivalent of Underworld or Arkanian (something easy enough to get for the average PVEr that they wouldn't subject themselves to PVP). Obviously, they can't do that now but when the inevitable next PVP gear grind starts up and they remove the current sets like they did with the WH ones they could do that. Or they could scrap Expertise being on gear and have it work like the reputation system instead. They'd remove the separate PVP gear set and instead you'd win comms to buy "PVP Reputation Tokens" that when used would increase your PVP rep up to whatever the equivalent of max Expertise is. At each level in the reputation climb, you'd gain Expertise. There, now the PVPers have a grind to keep them happy, and to avoid them having to grind PVE which they don't want to do, Bioware could make it statless save for bonuses expertise provides. So everyone regardless of gear would enter with the same stats, those with PVP Rep would get their 5 or 10 or whatever percent bonus, and in that way you keep the grind in tact and remove the desire of PVErs to do it.

So would I, because grinding out the War Hero relics when those were BIS was about the worst thing I've ever done in a game and I really don't want to do that again for the Obroan ****. I hate PVP, I don't want to touch it, the PVPers certainly don't want me to touch it, I gladly would never touch it, except getting DF relics requires a lot of time and luck whereas PVP relics requires a lot less of both (especially if you don't care about being competitive in the actual Warzones, and just do the bare minimum to get your medals in your PVE gear, team utility be damned, which rightfully angers the players who enjoy PVP). The easy way to fix the problem would be to make PVP relics not work in PVE just like PVE relics don't work in PVP. Bam, no more PVErs who want nothing to do with PVP but feel obligated to do it to advance their PVE characters clogging up your warzones. You can keep your gear grind and the PVErs can keep theirs.

Freelancer is way up there on my top games list of all time and with the amount of money they've raised I'm sure Star Citizen has a good chance to be amazing. That said, I haven't pledged yet. When the dogfighting module comes out and they have a little more "real" gameplay as opposed to just the assets in the hangar, I will probably pledge. What worries me more is not that it's a scam, but that, without a publisher, feature creep and the creative features are going to cause the game to never actually get released. While publishers do ruin a lot of games, they do at least provide more direction to a project than if you had a bunch of people trying to make their dream game and never actually finishing anything in search of perfection they likely will never achieve. That said, I've been watching it with great interest and really want it to succeed. But I'm not going to put my money where my mouth is just yet.

Well...that escalated quickly.

Agreed, I'm in a fairly casual small guild right now and have two healer friends pushing 40k HP because we don't have enough people to do HM ops and the enhancements on comm pieces suck. For pugging SM operations (and I'd be willing to bet most/all HM operations as well), that's going to be more than fine. My jug tank has been stuck in a weird mix of 78s/72s and a handful of 69s because the comm enhancements are so utterly useless (alacrity? What the ****, Bioware) that I can't actually improve any of his gear without losing a boatload of Defense Rating. My high endurance healer friends have the same problem: they'd love to lose a few thousand hitpoints for more main stat/power but they have no way to do it since they can't (and/or don't want to) run hard modes. For pugging SM's though, it's fine. At this point (at least on my server) pug groups have every SM on farm pretty effortlessly. The people you need to avoid are the ones actively stacking endurance over more useful stats.

A sink for the 87 bazillion elite comms you need something to do with. I wish HK didn't use droid specific parts. Would love to put him in 72 or 78 armorings.

Good statement. The best Pug DF run I've ever been on had people in 66s (and one person in 63s), I was by far and away the most geared person there and we flew through it pretty much effortlessly because they were good players. You might get more sympathy if this was after 3 wipes, but you're whining before the op even started and find it surprising people think you're a spoiled child?

Did it yesterday on my 42 Sorc, no cannister, did it today on her when she was 45 and no cannister, either. Haven't done it on my 55s yet so I did not even know there was supposed to be one as a reward.

For the cost of a Macbook pro you could build a screaming gaming desktop. For half the cost of a Macbook Pro you could still build a very nice machine. I don't see the point in spending $2000+ on a laptop when you already have a laptop that works fine. Gaming laptops are always going to be huge, heavy, hot, expensive, and have terrible battery life. If you have the money to avoid being stuck with one, build a desktop. I know you said you only play TOR but if you're willing to spend $2000 on a laptop, wouldn't spending half that much of a desktop provide more utility since you already have a laptop?

I'm sitting just under 40k HP on a jug tank that's not BIS but is mitigation focused. Makes me laugh when I pug and get told to off tank only for the 45-50k, 12% def chance "main tank" gets destroyed during [insert whatever fight you want here, I've probably seen it happen]. HP means nothing. I have a healer alt and a good friend who mains a healer and we both dread seeing 45+k tanks because we know it means we'll be scrambling for resources at some point when (not if) the tank spikes.

I do that, too. My interrupt is always the same slot, usually channeled offensive attacks (like Series of Shots on my sniper, Unload on my merc, Ravage on my Jug) are also in the same places. Helps a lot to keep things straight whens witching between characters.

Well I just had another one, currently sitting in a pug 16 man SV that just got decimated by some ******es with big egos who really shouldn't be pugging. 16 M SV gets called for, it's mostly 1 guild (like 10 of the players are from one guild) and they are filling with randoms. They pick up 2 people who are on alts but their mains are from one of the older and fairly well-known Progression guilds on this server. One was a sniper and one was a healer. The sniper kept pulling ahead of the tanks despite being told repeatedly to stop. He was warned one last time to stop doing it, pulled ahead of the tanks, and got kicked. His friend said "Wow you really kicked him? Peace out lol" and proceeded to aggro every single mob in the area between Thrasher and Infiltration and then left the group. Naturally we all died. This isn't the first time I've seen that kind of behavior from this particular guild. They get into Pug runs all the time and basically just do what they please. A different DPS from that same guild in a DF a few weeks ago (I was tanking this one) was exhibiting the same behavior of complaining constantly whenever we'd stop to explain the fights for new players and then *****ed when wipes would happen because people who were new to the operation (and who were actually speaking up when they needed explanations) didn't know what they were doing because he kept pulling ahead of everyone. Ignore lists really need to be account wide. Or maybe it would be nice to ignore entire guilds. I understand they are well geared and do progression stuff and know what's going on but when you go into a PUG run you need to understand not everyone is used to Progression raiding and you can't just assume everyone knows everything perfectly, nor should you be surprised when people don't move through everything as fast as your progression team does.

After Lost Island came out and before they nerfed it repeatedly, 2 guildies and I picked up a random fourth to go do HM LI. The fourth was a mercenary wearing exclusively tanking gear and who only used Rocket Punch, Rapid Shots, and Flamethrower for the entire flashpoint while in Combat Support Cylinder (no, he never threw a heal out). We basically three-manned the FP and got to the final boss when my guildie (who normally was a DPS merc but specced to heal this one) asked in group chat very politely "Hey could you please tell us what your rotation is because we can't figure out what you're doing and this boss is somewhat of a DPS check." The response back: "Rotation? What does my camera position have to do with fighting the boss?" Needless to say, we three-manned the final fight as well. A couple months ago I was doing HM Mando Raiders and had a sniper and an operative who were both from the same guild who refused to use orbital strike at all, ever regardless of how many mobs were grouped together. When asked why, they responded with "We don't want to waste the GCD on it." Before TFB and ROTHC came out, I was one of the tanks in an HM Denova with my guild and we had lost one person at Stormcaller and Firebrand person so we picked up a pug DPS who was geared for it and swore up and down that he'd done Denova before and knew all the fights. Fight starts, I jump up on Stormcaller, everyone's doing their thing properly, Double Destruction happens, I turn the turret to pass it to the DPS and this guy literally runs away from me when he sees the turret coming his way. I get blasted with DD and die, wipe. We explain to the DPS how the fight is supposed to work, he says he understands, has no questions, and has done it before so we start again, thinking maybe he was usually on Firebrand with his guild or something and was unaware of the Double Destruction mechanic. We jump up on the tanks again, it's all going well, Double Destruction again, I turn the turret and this idiot runs away from me again. I die again, we wipe, and this guy (he was a sorc if I remember correctly) angrily writes in chat "*** tank stop trying to kill me with the turret, you're causing us to wipe!" On a more ranty note, I could fill a book with stories from PUG operations I've run (almost always on my tank because I am apparently a glutton for punishment) about players who swear up and down they know the fights/mechanics to a given Operation and then proceed to do nothing right for the entire battle. Even worse is when someone does speak up when asked "Does everyone know this fight?", has it explained to them in detail, is asked after the explanation if they have any questions, and they still do it wrong. Or when I explain the fight to someone who doesn't know it and then someone else who didn't speak up goes and fails. What is so hard about admitting you are inexperienced? You're not saving yourself any time by bumbling around causing wipes and forcing restarts.

I don't think there was ever armor that looked exactly like that but there used to be the Tionese/Columi/Rakata set that looked similar. Those have since been removed from the game so you cannot get those pieces any more. That set had the gloves, pants, and boots for sure. The chest looked similar but not identical (looked much worse actually, if it looked like that pic I probably would have worn it for longer). Not sure about the head or the belt.

Originally they were going to allow you to kill off companions permanently but people are whining idiots and complained about companion permadeath so they removed the ability to do that early on (think it was early in the beta). No it doesn't make any sense from a canon standpoint but from a gameplay standpoint Quinn is your only healer so that probably played into the decision as well.